Names for the Sea, page 13
My head of department in England sends me an e-mail. He is planning next year’s teaching, and asks me to confirm my return at the end of the year. I don’t reply. I know what the answer is, really. I know that we are surviving on my Icelandic salary only by acts of self-denial to which no sane person would commit herself in the long term when there is an alternative on offer. The obvious and responsible choice is to return to the life we left, pick up the car from Anthony’s sister at the airport and go home as if we’d never left. I will tell Anthony that it’s time for us to make this decision. Later.
The Icesave Thing rumbles on through January and February. The debate, in theory, is over the interest rate and speed at which Iceland repays the governments of the UK and the Netherlands for their compensation of British and Dutch Icesave investors. There are protests in the parliament square, low-key Icelandic protests in which people pass around hot drinks and talk to their friends. Colleagues speak of ‘going to protest for an hour’ between classes or on Saturday afternoons, but even they can’t explain to me exactly what they are protesting for. They don’t like the situation, they are frustrated with the new government that replaced the Independence Party which had been in power from 1944 until the coalition it dominated collapsed in the Pots and Pans Revolution of 2009. Some don’t think that the state should bear responsibility for debt incurred abroad by privately owned banks, but no-one seems to have a plan for the kind of action that might result from this or any other principle. Early in March, two months after the President refused to sign an agreement that had passed through parliament, and thus triggered a national referendum, the voting papers go out. It’s a very Icelandic affair; the Law department at the university, charged with writing the pamphlet to explain the issue and procedure to all Icelandic voters, postponed doing so because they expected the referendum to be cancelled, which wasn’t unreasonable because the agreement at issue had been superseded by one that’s better for Iceland. But once the process has begun, there is neither a mechanism nor a popular will to abort it. So Iceland conducts a referendum over a paper that is already acknowledged by all concerned to be defunct and irrelevant, and ninety-eight per cent of Icelanders, reasonably enough, reject it. All the English language sources of Icelandic news and opinion concur that the referendum was nevertheless worthwhile because people feel good about having voted and it makes them feel better about the situation to have been consulted. I can’t help wondering if they wouldn’t have felt better yet had the money spent on organising the vote been given to the voters instead.
The same news sources offer daily stories of Icelanders having homes and cars repossessed and seeing their debt repayments rise far in excess of their income, partly because people took out mortgages and car loans in foreign currencies during the boom years and are still having to repay them in foreign currencies now the value of the króna has halved. I can see food getting more expensive week by week; turnips are now a treat and the sacks of frozen fruit and vegetables on which we rely, which came from Belgium in July and Poland in October, are now imported from China. But I can’t see Icelandic poverty. Mine seem to be the only children in Iceland with patches on their trousers. It’s rare to see anyone old enough to drive on a bus. Very few of my students and colleagues bring their own food to work. There are the cars, and the fireworks, and the absence of a second-hand market for anything but vehicles. Mine is among the oldest laptops on campus, although I make common cause with a student whose screen works only when she places clothes pegs at exact intervals along the edge. Max is given homework, which is actually homework for me, of eating meals made only from ingredients grown in tropical rainforests for a week. (This in a country about as far from a tropical rainforest as it’s possible to be, where imported food is highly taxed as well as expensive because of the transport costs. We make cocoa.) I’ve been wondering for a while, but now I begin to ask people why I can’t see the kreppa, offering the possibility that I’m just a stupid foreigner who doesn’t get it and can’t see what’s staring her in the face. No, say the students. Many of them have been wondering the same thing. No, say my colleagues, though if you’d seen the boom you’d be able to see the bust. So where is it, I ask, where is this crisis?
It’s the first time I feel able to ask a stupid question in public. You should talk to my grandson, says Pétur, his face softening as it does when he thinks of any of his grandchildren. Ása Björk’s boy, you know? He knows everyone in the young Left-Greens. Tómas Gabríel is Pétur’s oldest grandchild, son of Ása Bjórk the priest, and he was at the forefront of the demonstrations that brought down the right-wing government in a hail of stones and burning benches last winter. I’m keen to meet him because those demonstrations, leading to the Pots and Pans Revolution, took place between my acceptance of the job at the university and our coming to find an apartment and a school in May. It was hard to follow the detail from outside Iceland, especially without reading Icelandic, but I knew that the events of December 2008 and January 2009 were unprecedented in Iceland, and that some of my Icelandic acquaintances experienced those days of political activism as a time of personal as well as national revolution.
There had been protests outside the parliament building every Saturday afternoon through the autumn of 2008, sometimes as many as a few hundred people listening to speeches, holding placards and occasionally throwing eggs and toilet paper at the windows of the debating chamber. People were protesting against a government very closely allied with the ‘Viking Raiders’, the small group of bankers who had brought Iceland to the point of sovereign bankruptcy. Almost all the banks failed, their debts far in excess of Iceland’s GDP. The news during those months worsened from one week to the next, as unemployment rose from less than one per cent to ten per cent, average household debt was revealed to be 213 per cent of disposable income, and foreign currency transactions were suspended, jeopardizing the import of some medicines as well as books and fruit. University staff were asked to minimise the use of printers and photocopiers because the state institution could no longer afford ink and toner cartridges. As the value of the króna crashed against other currencies, the cost of Icelanders’ foreign-currency car loans and mortgages rose far beyond the value of the collateral as well as beyond the reach of the debtors. It became clear that Icelandic banks had been lending to Icelandic consumers without any consideration of their customers’ ability to pay. It was reported that Icelandic banks had lent money to their own employees to enable those employees to buy shares in the banks, using the shares as collateral for the loans. The suicide rate climbed sharply. Internationally, Britain used anti-terrorist legislation to freeze Icelandic assets, and the provision of aid from the International Monetary Fund was blocked by the Dutch in the hope of putting pressure on Iceland to repay Dutch investors in high-interest Icesave accounts. The extent of the government’s involvement with the Viking Raiders began to be apparent, although as I write in the winter of 2011 investigation of this corruption is still under way.
The government remained in power as its complicity with the Viking Raiders was exposed, and took the usual four-week Christmas recess despite Iceland’s state of acute crisis. When parliament reconvened on 20th January 2009, an angry crowd gathered. It was reported that the parliamentary agenda for that day included the possibility of paying organ donors, rearrangement of traffic priorities and discussion about allowing grocery shops to sell alcohol. (Most alcoholic drinks must be bought from the state monopoly ‘wine shops’ under current legislation.) The crowd grew. It was the day of President Barack Obama’s inauguration in the US, and Icelandic protestors had banners saying ‘Yes, we can!’ People brought household implements to make enough noise to force MPs to stop discussing wine shops and recognise their presence and their demands. There were old ladies banging spoons on pans, younger people with spades and wheelbarrows, fishermen with fog-horns. Some people lit emergency flares. Protestors banged on the windows of the debating chamber, and when the riot police arrived they were pelted with eggs and skyr. The police retaliated with pepper spray, using it indiscriminately and sometimes over walls and around corners to attack people they could not see. The protestors set up a nursing station to bathe victims’ eyes with milk before taking them to hospital. The crowd grew as the night wore on. No-one wants to stand still outside for very long in Iceland in winter. Every Christmas, Norway gives Iceland a Christmas tree for Austurvöllur square, where the parliament building is. The tree was still there, and made a good bonfire.
It took a week of protest to topple the government. Around 30,000 people, ten per cent of the Icelandic population, joined the demonstrations. Most of the people I know were there, with pans and banners, and those who were abroad at the time recall their shock at seeing pictures of angry crowds, tear gas and police batons in Iceland. I would like to hear from someone on the front line.
Tómas Gabríel lives just over the road from campus, and I pick my way there through heavy rain, over ankle-deep slush, as the sun goes down one day in March. He comes to the door, a thickset young man in a black T-shirt, and stands patiently while I pick with cold fingers at my boot-laces.
Tómas Gabríel lives in a block like Mads and Mæja’s, one that looks to British eyes like unloved 1970s council housing, where the outside space is worn grass with rubbish blowing around and – even here, even in March – the occasional used condom caught on low bushes. There are pebble-dash walls, and that kind of subdivided double-glazing that speaks of beaded macramé plant-holders and brown plastic upholstery. But not here. Inside, there are white walls, gleaming wooden floors and a comfortable clutter of well-designed modern furniture, plants, musical instruments and books. A pair of desirable embroidered shoes lies on the floor where someone has kicked them off to curl up in one of the chairs, and there are ironed white linen cloths on the table. Tómas Gabríel brings me coffee. His arm is in a sling, following, he says, surgery on a dislocated little finger. It sounds like one of those mishaps which fills you with wonder that such an apparently peripheral part of the body can cause so much trouble.
So, I say, tell me about your politics.
He tells me that he was raised in a strongly socialist household. No-one from Pétur’s clan could say otherwise: we need to get rid of money, Pétur says, and go back to barter. But Tómas Gabríel’s mother relied on example to show him what was right; she never told him how she voted, so when he came of age he did his own research and came to his own conclusions. Tómas Gabríel ‘fell in love’ with the Left-Greens, the party that formed a coalition government after the Pots and Pans Revolution. When he started his philosophy degree at the University of Iceland, he made friends with the students running the youth branch of the party, and in autumn 2008 he joined the managing committee. It seemed, he says, like a way of changing things for his country and his generation, as if all that he and his friends needed to take power was courage. The idea of standing for parliament in your early twenties is not as fantastic in Iceland as it would be in the UK, especially since the elections in 2010; the youngest member of the Alþing is in his early twenties and there are government ministers younger than me.
‘I went to all the demonstrations at the beginning, when they were peaceful. And then things started boiling up in November and December. My friend was becoming more of an anarchist, and it was a wild ride getting to know everyone – not the people behind the scenes because there was no ‘behind the scenes’; they were at the scene, the people you saw in all the pictures and footage of the demonstrations. And then one of the activists, someone who became my friend later, made this really good protest. He took the Bonus flag, you know?’
Bonus is owned by the corrupt banker who owns most other Icelandic chains and indeed owned half the British high street. The same man owns Hagkaup, and there are well-substantiated rumours that when the produce in Hagkaup gets too old to sell, it is sent to Bonus for poorer people to buy. The Bonus flag, which flies in every Icelandic village and suburb, is daffodil-yellow with a bright pink pig on it, presumably not intended as a symbol of greed.
One Saturday in December, Tómas Gabríel’s friend climbed up the parliament building, one of the taller buildings downtown, and replaced the Icelandic flag that flies there with the Bonus pig. The crowd of protesters roared, but the debate in the chamber went on. There were only two police officers present, as it was the first mass demonstration and the police were taken by surprise. The demonstrators helped the climber to get away, having been alerted to the imminent arrival of the ‘Viking Squad’. (The Viking Squad is Iceland’s armed response unit, not to be confused with the Viking Raiders, although these multiple claims on ‘Viking’ identity are revealing.)
Ordinary citizens have a right of access to the parliament building. This right is important to Icelanders, symbolic of communal responsibility as well as rights. There may be broken windows but there will be no bombs or guns. You can park right outside the door, less than a metre from the debating chamber. I regularly take a shortcut between campus and the city centre that passes between two parliamentary buildings. (It’s also under the flight path of the city airport, less than a kilometre from the runway, the one used by the planes on which you’re allowed to take firearms and up to five kilogrammes of ammunition.)
Tómas Gabríel continues. The following week, his friend was arrested on questionable grounds to do with his membership of Saving Iceland, a charity and campaign group concerned to protect Iceland’s pristine landscapes. Tómas Gabríel’s friend had been protesting against the building of the Kárahnjúkar dam in 2006. Most of the people I know protested against that. One of the last projects of the discredited government was to flood a huge swathe of the highlands, bulldozing some of the oldest archaeological sites in Iceland, to provide hydroelectricity for an enormous, American-owned aluminium smelter. The contractor used immigrant labour to build the dam, and is alleged to have kept the workers underground for twelve hours at a time without access to drinking water or lavatories; there are reports of people licking the tunnel walls for water. Kárahnjúkar was demonstrably the most dangerous workplace in Iceland since records began, and there are accounts of foreign workers being forced back into tunnels before poisonous explosive gas had cleared. There had been an outstanding warrant for Tómas Gabríel’s friend for three years, and the police came for him as he left his philosophy class on the Friday before a large demonstration planned for the Saturday.
‘So he had an outstanding warrant and he had to choose between doing jail time and paying a fine, and he chose to do jail time because he didn’t want to give any more money to that government. We have a long waiting list for jails in Iceland, and the law states that you have to have three weeks notice when you get to the top of the list, so that you can put your affairs in order with your family and at work.’ (There are so many uniquely Icelandic assumptions in Tómas Gabríel’s explanation that at first I don’t understand what he’s saying. There is a waiting list for Icelandic prisons, because there aren’t enough spaces in the prison for everyone who receives a jail sentence. So, after conviction, criminals go back to work and home, and when a space comes up in prison they are given three weeks notice of their incarceration.) ‘But they didn’t give him the three weeks notice. It didn’t escape anyone that this was an attempt to take control of the protesters. It backfired, because after that demonstration we marched up to the police station. It had been peaceful until then, and we spent hours waiting outside, with slogans and speeches, but then it reached boiling point and the door got kicked in. And that was the beginning of everything, that day in January. After that we knew it was real. They sprayed the crowd with pepper spray, with no discrimination and no warning. They’re supposed to warn you first, but we were all in the lobby of the police station – we had kicked in the first door, so they might have felt threatened – and this hand just reached round and started spraying. There was a sixteen-year-old in hospital with burnt corneas. It was – hilarious.’ He doesn’t sound amused. He sounds disbelieving, betrayed. ‘I had great respect for the police. I used to think about joining the police, to help people. They handle very dear matters, very delicate situations. If someone dies at home, they are first on the scene. They help grieving families and people escaping domestic violence. But you expect the people who uphold the laws to follow the laws, and when they don’t – well, the social contract is breached. It’s a different situation. If the police don’t respect the law, why should we?’
Tómas Gabríel is speaking fast, his eyes on the wall above my head, as if he’s seeing the scenes from last year projected there. I sip my coffee, wait for the next instalment. Traffic swishes through the slush outside; we’re getting towards rush hour. He tells me about the beginning of the protests, the anger and excitement among his friends. After their philosophy class, they walked around the lake to parliament.
